William Hitchcock reviews “Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe,” by Melissa Feinberg on Lawfare. A book concerning the propaganda facet of the Cold War, William finds the contrast between the inhabitants of Eastern Europe and their search for the truth, and today’s relative disregard for the truth in the search for intellectual & emotional comfort, disconcerting:
And here lies a crucial difference between Feinberg’s period and our own. In the Stalinist era, millions of captive peoples fought hard to sustain the idea that facts and truth existed beyond a world of state propaganda. Eyes and ears, honed by years of practice, learned to differentiate the base falsehoods in the media from plausible truths. Yet in our own era, when Americans are free to say, and read, and believe whatever we wish, millions of us choose to adhere to obvious untruths. From the grassy knoll to the faked moon landing, from Vince Foster to Pizzagate, outlandish conspiracy theories, none of them manufactured by state organs, have nonetheless been canonized as truth across much of the land. Eastern Europeans in the Stalin age yearned for truth and took risks to seek it out. Many people today prefer to hide behind our own curtain of lies.
It’s a little ironic that the winner of the Cold War, the self-proclaimed bastion of truth and goodness, is falling victim to political propaganda – and both sides of the political divide will claim that the other side is the trusting neophyte, of course. But will either side take an honest gander at the other side? While the left certainly earns the disdain of the right through its shitty attitudes, I suspect the right is the guilty party, based on the work of conservative Bruce Bartlett. Go read it, if you haven’t already.
The more comfortable life has become, the more we can indulge in fantasies that satisfy our biases. Only when a bias can become a life or death question will it be excised by the lazy. Even the energetic must work hard to remove them.
